Delirious (36 page)

Mackenzie’s body, Charlie believed—without any conscious recollection—would be discovered in the woods surrounding Flint’s Pond. His wife had probably already reported him missing. The time line, according to InVision, had given Charlie plenty of opportunity to write the notes and put the box under the bed.

Charlie scanned the interior of the car for any evidence of blood. Nothing was noticeable. He popped the trunk with a pull of a lever under the dashboard casing and exited the car. He didn’t need to open the trunk to detect a smell coming from inside that was not unlike the smell from underneath the motel room bed. Once the trunk was opened, he peered inside it and staggered back a few steps at the sight of the bloodied hacksaw inside. There was blood all over
the trunk’s carpeting, too, but at least no other body parts were visible.

The only other item in the trunk brought him a feeling of relief. There was a way out of the nightmare, and he now knew it. His mother’s life would be spared. Joe’s life, too, in a way, for her death would shorten his brother’s life substantially. He couldn’t face a lifetime in prison. He was certain of that. Especially having to live each day without any memory of the crimes for which he’d be convicted. There was, however, a simple way out. And he was looking right at it. Charlie reached down and pulled out his father’s .38 Special. He must have taken it from the house when he went there to get the keys to his BMW. The chamber was loaded.

There wasn’t any note to guide him on what to do next. Eddie Prescott didn’t speak to him. But now none of that was necessary. Only one course of action made any sense.

With the gun in hand, Charlie climbed back into the front seat of his BMW. He felt comforted by the gun’s steely weight and coolness. It was the first time since he was a kid that he had touched the gun, at least the first time he remembered. His mother had kept it in a shoe box in the attic. It was a memento from her former life, but she wasn’t one to let go of much. The house, with its old furniture and appliances, was testament to that.

Charlie hoisted the gun to his head. His finger trembled on the trigger.

How much pain will I feel?
he wondered.
How much pain have I caused?

With the gun pressed against his temple, Charlie closed his eyes and prayed that the end wouldn’t hurt as much as he imagined.

B
ill Evans, the great jazz pianist, once recorded a cover of the Johnny Mandel and Mike Altman classic, “Suicide Is Painless.” The song became famous as the theme for both the movie and TV series
M*A*S*H.
Toward the end Charlie’s father seemed to favor the eerie Evans rendition, perhaps expressing his darkest thoughts without words. It seemed fitting for Charlie to remember that song at this moment. He had even learned to play the tune note perfect on guitar, but his father had been unimpressed. He had never been one to gush, but toward the end he’d been void of all emotion. Perhaps his father had followed through with his secret wish. Perhaps they would meet soon.

That his life would come to an end in the parking lot of a decrepit motel in Revere was as stunning and disappointing to him as the horrific crimes he had committed without memory. In newspaper articles about his life reporters would portray the events as they saw fit. It would be a sad and tragic tale that would feed an insatiable public’s hungry appetite for sensational stories. It would catch fire the way a match could vaporize a tank of gasoline. His legacy, all that he’d worked so hard to achieve, would not only be wasted, but he would forever be associated with some of history’s most notorious psychopaths. For a man who had risen to the top, not because he’d let other people dictate outcomes for him, but because he’d controlled everything around him, this end was hardly a fitting one. The thought of the press having a field day at his expense, tearing apart his life and what little legacy he had, was nearly as revolting as the act of suicide itself.

Charlie set the gun down on the seat beside him. He was going to die. Given the risk to his mother’s safety and his own unwillingness to live his days behind bars, no other alternative was acceptable.

But his unyielding need for control would not allow him to disappear from earth without at least some say in how he would be portrayed in the press. Charlie reached into the glove compartment to retrieve the pen and paper he kept inside for recording his BMW’s maintenance history. Extracting the notebook from the glove compartment, Charlie set it down next to the gun and opened the notebook flap.

He would write a short explanation of events. It wouldn’t be a confession, as he had no memory to confess. It would be, as best as he could offer, an explanation and an apology. Rather than admit or deny guilt, an expression of remorse would at least leave the impression of a sorrowful man and not just a wretched, unspeakable evil.

Charlie noticed the yellow Post-it note stuck to the inside flap of the notebook. It caught his attention. It was the first note that he had written to himself. The one he’d found attached to the inside flap of his BlackBerry. The words were as cryptic and prophetic now as they had been then.

If not yourself, then who can you believe?

The words blurred as tears welled in his eyes. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the folded picture of his family. He unfolded it and looked down at his mother’s head circled in pen. He and Joe stood on either side of her like dutiful guardian sons. A wave of hopelessness swept through him. The idea of leaving an explanatory note behind now seemed ridiculous.

What difference does it make how the public sees me?
he thought.
I am a monster. What good could come from leaving a note behind?

Charlie set the photograph down on his left leg, turning it over so that the photographic visages of his mother and Joe wouldn’t bear witness to his death. The Post-it note he tacked to his right leg. The messages written rested on his legs like signposts of his confusion. He hoisted the gun again to his head. This time he pressed the barrel of the gun harder to his temple until he felt the steel end boring painfully into the bone of his skull. His head dropped and his eyes
closed. His finger began to tense, and he drew the trigger toward the pistol grip.

“I won’t die with my eyes closed,” Charlie said aloud.

He was looking down at his lap when he opened his eyes. He saw the two notes, the one written on the back of the photograph, the other penned on the yellow Post-it note. The words on the back of the photograph seemed fitting last words to see before he died.

Surprise no more. Good-bye, Mother.

He read the yellow Post-it note again, as well, believing for a moment that he could remember having written those words down.

If not yourself, then who can you believe?

He stared at the two notes side by side, one on each leg. Then he held his breath.

Something about them is wrong,
he thought.

He set the gun down again and picked up the notes to examine them more closely. As he did, a stunning similarity became evident. As individual writing samples, they were both unmistakably his penmanship. But they also had something else much more significant in common. On each of the notes, the letter
u
had a slight bulge at the letter’s counter, the unenclosed part of the
u
. It looked to Charlie as if the pen had made two or three passes at that part of the letter, leaving behind thicker and darker lines, which weren’t present on any other letters. More disturbing was the exact similarity of the markings on the letter
u
in the two different notes. It wasn’t just a close similarity; the bulge and thickness of the line beneath the counter of the
u
in each note were identical. That sort of precision similarity had only one possible explanation. Whatever it was that wrote these notes, it wasn’t human.

Leaving the gun on the seat, Charlie jumped out of the car and raced back into the motel room. He picked up the note that had been taped to the TV from the top of the bureau, where he had left it, and dashed back out of the room. Stepping back into the car, Charlie held up the three notes in his hands to compare them.

Surprise no more. Good-bye, Mother.

If not yourself, then who can you believe?

Look under the bed.

The markings beneath the counter of the
u
in each note had the exact same thickness and bulge. All three were identical typographical
mistakes. And the only thing capable of making the same exact typographical mistake, without variation, countless numbers of times was a computer.

Still, he had to be sure. And for that, there was only one place he could check. Turning the car on again, the InVision system, as designed, hummed back to life.

“Hello, Charlie,” InVision cooed again. “I hope you’re having a great day.”

“Call,” Charlie said.

“Please confirm,” InVision said. “Did you say ‘Call’?”

“Yes.”

“Who would you like to call?” InVision asked.

“Dr. Rachel Evans,” Charlie said.

R
achel Evans had had a hell of a day yesterday, and this one wasn’t shaping up to be much better. She had spent seven exhausting hours with the Walderman top brass, reviewing security procedures in the aftermath of Charlie’s escape.

Then, against her better judgment, she’d taken a call from Joe Giles on her private line. He wouldn’t say why over the phone, but he’d begged her to meet him in her office as soon as possible. She had planned to go to the office early, anyway, to check for new developments in Charlie’s case. She’d agreed to meet Joe at 7:30 a.m., which didn’t leave much time to get dressed and ready.

Joe’s frantic tone had been more than troubling. She worried about behavioral regression. Given all that she had invested in his treatment and the fact that Joe’s progress was partly responsible for her meteoric rise within Walderman, his well-being was particularly important to her.

Even though she was running late, she couldn’t resist her morning habit of checking e-mail and her favorite news sites before leaving for work. It was then she learned of the all-out manhunt for Charlie. It was the lead story on both Boston.com and the
Herald
, as well as two other local news sites she’d bookmarked.

Rachel gasped when she read the grisly emerging details of Leon Yardley’s murder in his Concord home. The story named Charlie as a “person of interest.” The political favor Walderman had cashed in with the Belmont police to keep the escape out of the public eye had been a tragic case of poor judgment, she concluded. She had warned her superiors about the dangers of politicizing patient care. That argument
held little sway with the facility directors, who constantly battled public opinion and fears of safety to keep the grants, licensing, and tax conditions working in their favor. Without those, Walder-man’s future would be jeopardized and the care of patients threatened. Creating public alarm every time a borderline patient might pose a public threat would create an air of mistrust between the community and the care center.

The perception of security was paramount to the institution’s survival. Only patients classified as an immediate threat to public safety justified a press release and news conference. Otherwise, good relations with the police typically kept such incidents under the radar of public awareness. An escapee would certainly threaten facility funding. Also a certainty, Shapiro would be one of the first to go if the money dried up. He was the one who had convinced Walderman’s board that Charlie would merely continue to fantasize about killing, and had doubted such fantasies would manifest into actual violence. They had put hospital interests ahead of public safety, and it would cost them a lot more than the loss of public confidence.

Rachel finished reading an updated report on WBZ-TV’s local news Web site. Charlie wasn’t named a suspect on that report, either, just a person of interest. But his escape from Walderman was clearly and accurately documented in the piece. She wondered where they had got their information.

Joe was waiting outside her office when she arrived and seemed in a frantic state. He wore a blue T-shirt, ripped slightly at the bottom, a navy blue Windbreaker, and jeans spotted with dark brown stains of varying sizes. His eyes darted about the room, as if he were afraid he might be assaulted, and he continually rubbed his hands together. Rachel observed that he would interlock his fingers, crack his knuckles, and start rubbing his hands together again, as though he were massaging hand cream into the skin. His hair was a tangled, bushy mess. When he wasn’t rubbing his hands together, Joe ran his fingers though his hair and pulled at the roots.

“Sit down, Joe,” Rachel said. “Please sit.”

“I can’t. I can’t!” Joe cried.

Rachel assumed he had already heard the news about his brother and that was why he needed to see her. A guiding principle of her profession was that the patient had to provide all the answers, not
the therapist. That philosophy held true even when the answers were obvious.

“Joe, please tell me what is going on.”

“The nightmares are getting worse,” Joe said. “They’re even more violent and real. I’m worried I’m regressing. I don’t want to go back to where I was.” Joe paused a moment. “I won’t,” he added.

Rachel was stunned. He hadn’t read or seen the news this morning. Charlie’s plight might push him over the edge. Even so, concealing the truth, as Charlie’s situation tragically reinforced, was not how she operated.

“Joe, please sit down,” Rachel said.

Joe hesitated. “Do we need to do a full review of my medications?” he asked. “When Mom wakes up, she’ll be heartbroken if I lose my job. I can’t get angry again. I just can’t.”

“Listen to me,” Rachel said. “We have something more immediate to discuss.”

“What?” Joe asked.

Before Rachel could answer, her cell phone rang. She looked down at the number and gasped.

“What?” Joe asked.

“Oh my God,” Rachel breathed.